The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

by Shokoofeh Azar

  The Creator with himself always content

  Surrounded by hope and joy, fireflies, one day is alone.

  The end of the world.

  With no nightly disturbance, a cry:

  O Creator, where is your justice?

  During those mutually sleepless nights, Dad would peek into Beeta’s and my room, worrying about Sohrab’s fate, and then drive his silver Buick Skylight to the coast. He would sit on the damp sand and listen to the frightening sound of waves at night. He would examine shells with a torch and fill his pockets with a colourful collection, returning home and rearranging them in the empty aquarium, until morning. Sometimes Dad still wakes up in the middle of the night and tunes into American radio to listen to political news inside Iran. Radio is the only form of mass communication in our home. Whenever the prefound the floor littered withsenter on Voice of America announces, between news stories, music by Iranian singers who fled Iran to America after the Revolution, he turns down the volume and presses one of the large shells to his ear to listen to the sea. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply on his pipe, stretching his legs out on the couch, just like in the old days when we would all go to Hotel Ghou; like those times when there were no Revolutionary Guards to call us bourgeois, or accuse Beeta of acts against national security because her headscarf was pushed too far back on her head. And sometimes, while sawing a piece of wood, applying finish or preparing marbled paper for his calligraphy, Dad listens to his favourite singers. He listens to Delkesh, who now lives who knows where, or Marzieh or Vigan; to Haideh who fled to America after the Revolution:

  For my sad house

  for my sad alley

  for you, for all those like us

  it is singing I’m sad.

  Or Banan, singing:

  Every night like a flute I moan in sorrow

  You took my heart and soul but did not become my lover

  You were with me, you left without me

  Like the fragrance of a flower, where have you gone?

  Alone I am left, alone you have gone.

  Sometimes in the middle of the night, Mum would wake up, too, and they would cut wood or apply finish together. One night when the political news anchor for Voice of America broke the silence between them, they didn’t even look at each other, because in their mind’s eye each was looking at Sohrab. They just sawed wood: rr-rr, rr-rr, rr-rr. The anchor was saying, now that Ayatollah Khomeini had agreed to end the eight-year war and the Security Council Resolution 598 had been signed, there were signs that he would avenge this defeat; so dark things lay in store for Iran, but no political analyst could predict yet what this might be. Dad thought Mum was crying while Mum thought it was Dad.

  Early in the morning when, to the sound of my favourite rooster, Captain Namu, Mum and Dad came to, they saw that dawn was breaking and found the floor littered with misshapen pieces of cut wood they didn’t know what to do with. At first Dad reprimanded Mum for ruining all their frame wood. Then Mum yelled at Dad for putting all the wood in front of her. In the end, they both started laughing; and they laughed so hard tears rolled down their cheeks. Then Dad took Mum’s head in his arms so her sobs and wailing wouldn’t disturb our early morning slumber.

  The place that most resembled our ancestral home was under the rafters. It was full of mice that scurried up and down satin cloth, tables of inlaid wood, and portraits of ancestors living and dead, that even ate the mothballs. It was a place full of stashes of notebooks and paper and termite-infested hand-written books and old photographs; full of fine old carpets, jajims, and kelims that Mum had stashed so the mice, moths, and termites would annihilate as much of them as quickly as possible. Mum so detested life after the Revolution that she was afraid to look at the past, fearing that even the smallest object would remind her of past happiness. That’s why there were mice everywhere. Sometimes, when the sound of mice and termites under the rafters got really loud, Mum would go up and sit on one of the dusty couches in the steamy, suffocating air and look at the mice’s feast; the beauty and history gnawed away bit by bit. All of those things made up decades of memories and past identity. They had survived for centuries. We are not the first people to have destroyed ourselves; with a city where all devices of happiness were present, she thought. Then she would descend teary-eyed and get as far away from the house as possible. She would sit under a tree in the forest and sob. Once she had cried herself out, she would come back, her nose red, eyes puffy, and begin cooking, slowly humming a poem by Shamlu in her beautiful voice:

  Slept the sun and the earth slept

  like a mother at the death of her son, wept.

  Turned to the dark tent of night, haggard,

  the sea to the death of my happiness, laggard.

  It was an unspoken agreement that we all accepted and indeed honoured unconcerned, Mum’s strange love for Sohrab. Sohrab wasn’t just Mum’s darling twenty-six-year-old son. For Mum, Sohrab wasn’t a son awaiting an uncertain fate, imprisoned in an uncertain prison. For Mum, he was the culmination of heartbeats, desires, loves and hopes that she had endured her entire life; of which she dreamed, for which she searched in novels and in the layers of poetry; and which in the end, she lost. Though she never said a word when Sohrab was arrested, the only other person who knew of his fate, perhaps with the exception of me, was Mum. She who, although seconds before had been going over her dream from the night before, attained enlightenment atop the greengage tree the very moment Sohrab was executed. The night before Sohrab’s execution, Mum had woken terrified, from a dream and, clutching at her left breast she thought, they’ve killed Sohrab. Then, looking anxiously at a spot of blood on her shirt, she lifted it and on her left breast saw the marks of two tiny baby teeth that had drawn blood exactly where Sohrab had done, when he was a baby. It was right after seeing that drop of blood that an invisible force pulled her up the greengage tree, to be stricken by that silent mania, that sudden enlightenment.

  Long before we learned of the connection between Sohrab’s name and Mum’s teenage love, we had heard that when she was pregnant with him she had dreamed that while in her stomach he had dreamed he was crawling naked in a dense forest. He crawls and crawls before stopping in front of a tree just like other trees, and crawls up it. After a short while, he pauses before continuing. Now the baby realises that when he moves, the tree grows and when he stops, it stops. The baby continues to climb higher and higher and the tree grows taller and taller. He climbs so high, and the tree grows so tall and broad, that it consumes half of the earth. When the baby reaches the top of the huge tree, he looks at the ground below, pauses, is absorbed into the bark, and disappears.

  Later, when she described the dream at Sohrab’s fifteenth birthday party, everyone offered an interpretation. Except Sohrab. He just shrugged his shoulders and with his usual humour said, “Well, I for one, don’t remember anything”.

  When Sohrab was still around, one of our summer pastimes was to use badminton racquets to catch baby mice in the rooms and rafters. Then the three of us siblings would hold a field trial to decide their fate, and issue and execute the final ruling before Dad—the murderer of mice—got home. “The death of a baby mouse won’t fix anything. The laws of nature should not be violated. It would be better not to have blood on our hands.” The three of us would mercifully release the terrified mice from the corner of the attic and, satisfied and smiling, would watch them disappear into the distance. But now it is a precious treasure trove of Iranian handicrafts that has fallen prey to the mice under the rafters. And yet compared to what’s in Granddad’s house, it wouldn’t even fill up a small trunk of antiques. In the autumn of 1961 when Mum first saw Dad’s house and family, the magnificence of that big, eighteen-bedroom house with its corridors and vestibules, dais and terrace left her speechless and, for a moment, unable to move. If Dad hadn’t put his arm around her and guided her forward in time, she surely would have shamed herself in front of her husband’s mother Gordafarid, and his father Jamshid, as the first
daughter-in-law of the family. In fact, the house was a Qajar mansion whose halls, vestibules and corridors with their gilding, plasterwork and mirrors drew stares and took the breath of anyone who first entered it. It was full of objects that Roza had only read about in books and whose pictures she had seen in magazines: colourful Iranian, Chinese and Indian silks, valanced chairs, velvet Iranian drapes, hundred-armed crystal chandeliers, porcelain vases and violet tulips, porcelain dishes decorated with flowers and birds, paisley-covered cushions; rare silk carpets from Naiin and Kashan; portraits of Qajar and Pahlavi Shahs and Zakariya Razi, the family’s great ancestor; inlaid and carved tables and chairs from Esfehani masters, Italian furniture, silver dishes; and a bookcase with books in every language from Russian, Chinese, English, French and German, to Tibetan, Sanskrit, Aramaic, Pahlavi, Latin and Arabic. With its books and both traditional and modern furnishings, the house was a combination of the Qajar and Pahlavi eras. Just like its inhabitants. That day in particular Dad, who was just twenty-five, had been on his way back from a week in a small cave he had found near Abshar Dogholu. During that week, he had played his tar until blood dripped from his fingertips and red lichen had sprouted from the stones and blossomed. On his way back, it was not yet dark on the slopes of Darband when his eye caught Mum who, so engrossed in a collection of poetry by Sohrab Sepehri, saw neither the people around her nor the beautiful orange sunset. This allowed Dad to observe her for a long time. Mum didn’t raise her head until she had finished reading The Wayfarer. When she did raise her eyes, she was no longer in this world and saw no one. She was travelling in a universe in which she and Sohrab were the only voyagers. From her surroundings, she heard nothing but buzzing. Just one phrase echoed in her mind like the sound of repeated thunder on the windows of a lone bedroom at night:

  And love, only love

  carried me to the expanse of life’s sorrow

  delivered me to the places to become a bird.

  Dad approached Mum right then and there, and had he not used his intelligence, he would have lost her, forever. He was clever enough to begin the conversation with a poem by Sepehri and give Mum new information on the poet, so that from the very first moment, she felt they had much to talk about. It was thus that at not yet ten o’clock at night, Roza did the most daring thing she had ever done in her life: agreeing to marry the man who would become my father, without the counsel or permission of her only family—her mother. A mullah, cold and fearful of dark spectres and fog, appeared out of the darkness on the slope and agreed to marry them right then and there, for twenty Tomans.

  It was only years later when Beeta, Sohrab and I asked Mum and Dad why Sohrab’s name, unlike ours, started with the letter ‘S’, that Mum finally told the story of how she had gone to buy books on Nasser Khosro Street, which at the time was where all the bookshops were, and had bought The Wayfarer, which had just been published. While reading that long poem, her feet had suddenly been lifted from the ground and she flew above passers-by and booksellers as misty rain fell on her Wayfarer. Puffing on his pipe, Dad listened intently as Mum recalled that day. Reading The Wayfarer under the gentle rain, then noticing with surprise that her feet had detached from the earth and that she was flying over people in Nasser Khosro Street, it was the hand of a young man on her shoulder that brought her back. He was extremely thin and his thick beard made him look like a hippie. Had it not been for his kind and polite words, Mum would have reacted harshly to this skinny, little bearded man who had made her feet stick firmly to the cobblestones of Nasser Khosro Street, once again. He looked at Mum and told her she’d dropped her wallet. Without thanking him she retrieved it and, still engrossed in, My heart is singularly sad and nothing/ not the fragrant moments falling silent on the branches of the bitter orange/ nor the honest words in the silence between two matthiola petals/ no, nothing from the empty throng all around/ can free me, she continued on her way. However, she had taken no more than a few steps before the same young man again placed his hand on Mum’s shoulder, only this time to ask her if she would be willing to join him for a coffee, Mum’s favourable reaction surprised both of them so much that they laughed. Two hours later, after having discussed the living flowing spirit in The Wayfarer’s verses; and Roza—who had just finished high school—having spoken of her dream of becoming a poet; and the young man had told of his mysterious journey to India from which he had just returned; and they had both shared so much of themselves that their coffee had become cold twice, Roza suddenly remembered that she had to get home as soon as possible lest her old, solitary mother become anxious. It wasn’t until their hurried goodbye, when premature darkness made Roza run from him into the streaming rain to cross the crowded Shah Reza Street, that she heard his name through the din of car horns, violent acceleration and the squeal of brakes: Sohrab Sepehri.

  Mum says that when she heard his name, her knees went weak and she almost got run over by a car. She wanted to run back across the street. She wanted to scream. She wanted to call out to him. She wanted to say to him, “Don’t go … Stay …”. But it was too late. Sohrab had disappeared in the throng of people running in the sudden rain, while Roza was left standing there with the noise of horns and braking all around, a Parker pen the young man had given her as a memento, in her hand. This was the very pen that years later would be capriciously stolen from on top of her desk by a mullah who had come with several Revolutionary Guards to arrest her son, Sohrab. Perhaps it was fear of loss that prompted her to accept my father, Hushang’s marriage proposal just several months later. She mustn’t lose another Sohrab. Later, when Mum admitted to Dad that if she had seen Sohrab Sepehri just one more time she would never have let him go, Dad wasn’t too upset because from his many literary and musical circles he heard from friends that Sohrab was an otherworldly poet who had never had a girlfriend and didn’t want to marry. This turned out to be correct. Years and years later, on April 21, 1980 when newspapers ran the headline: AUTHOR OF ‘THE WAYFARER’ DEPARTS ON ETERNAL VOYAGE, Sohrab was still single. Dad did not anticipate breaking her heart, but instead, let her find the news out for herself. Several months later, when Roza was flipping through Dad’s journals and read about Sohrab Sepehri’s death, Hushang left her alone for the whole day to cry for her departed wayfarer.

  Walking around the attic among deserted holy objects, I remember the attic is also the place of pleasure and merrymaking for the ghosts of the family’s deceased. That is what Beeta says. She who believes that on many occasions she heard footsteps, nickering laughter and the click of the light switch being turned on and off, coming from under the rafters. Beeta says that however resistant the people in this family might be to death, the clan’s dead are not few in number. Once, when Beeta was sitting in Dad’s workroom to take advantage of its coolness and read a book in Dad’s absence, she saw a rickety old man with a white silk cloak and white Zoroastrian hat descend the steps from the attic. Looking at him wide-eyed, Beeta recognised him immediately and said, “You’ve come all this way to frighten me?” He was none other than our ancestor, Zakariya Razi, the tenth-century scholar, discoverer of alcohol and author of one hundred and eighty-four books on medicine, alchemy and philosophy; who was excommunicated by other newly-converted Muslim Iranians for writing two books on the uselessness and fraudulence of the prophets, which were then burned. When our great ancestor came down the steps with hunched back and eyes weakened from mercury gas and steam, he turned to Beeta and said, “There is something you need to do”. Frightened, Beeta asked, “Why me?” The frail old man answered, “Because you will be the trunk’s sole heir”. “What trunk?” Beeta asked. The great ancestor said, “You’ll understand later. You have to promise to protect the trunk from their evil until the appointed time”. He moved his eyes and eyebrows in such a way as he said ‘their’ that Beeta understood who he meant.